COMMENTARY

Hijacking Hillary

Can you get elected to the world’s most prestigious office if you aren’t even the leader of your own entourage?

I suspect you can in at least one case, which happens to be the case at hand.

Hillary Clinton is not going to lose any votes, but win some, by the prospect that she’ll take Husband Bill back to the White House if she wins. So she may as well relax out on the hustings and let Bill be Bill, meaning the star of the show, the one-man talkathon, the lingerer-in-chief.

He’ll get off-message from time to time, but she can shake her head and say that’s just Bill. She can say he gets a lot more right than he gets wrong, but that, in the end, she’s the one who’ll be president.

I was rendered nostalgic reading the accounts by the New York Times and Politico of Hillary’s trip to Iowa on Sunday. She was there for U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin’s traditional “Steak Fry.”

More to the point, she was there for the important purpose of teasing Iowa caucus-goers about her near-certain forthcoming race for president.

Bill came with her, which, naturally, turned out to seem the other way around. He hijacked the whole deal, of course.

First the two of them came out for a photo opportunity with Harkin and some beef, then wandered over to the gaggle of reporters. After a short while, the emerging candidate, Hillary, walked away quietly. Bill stayed for an extended interchange with rapt reporters.

Back in the day, I’d actually find myself advising then-Gov. Bill at times to quit taking my questions. His aides would keep trying to get him to move along to his next item on his schedule. I would be wholly distracted by their worry, which became mine, that he was hopelessly late.

“Please stop talking to me — go,” I’d urge, and he’d say, “Huh? Oh, no. Don’t worry about it. They’re always trying to hurry me.”

I don’t think he senses time well. A golf partner told of playing a half-round with him one afternoon before a major evening event. Bill talked so much and took so many mulligans that dusk loomed after nine holes. Yet Bill prepared obliviously to venture out for the 10th hole.

This golfing buddy told him he couldn’t. The buddy explained that they had to end their play for the day because the big event was imminent.

What kept Bill engaged with reporters Sunday was the state of Democratic chances in the midterms. Those chances are not horrible, he said. It’s all about turning out more Democratic voters than customarily show up in the midterms, he said. It’s all about changing the midterm dynamic, he said.

Of Arkansas’ U.S. Senate race, he said he was impressed with the way Mark Pryor had played his hand. He said Pryor could win with a heavy turnout.

So then it came time for speeches at the Harkin event. And there was a problem: Hillary was originally slated to speak last, but someone mentioned that protocol dictates that presidents always speak last.

So Hillary’s headliner gig turned into a warm-up act.

She went first and read a text intended to be lighthearted — declaring that she was “baaack,” and that she only came for the steak, and that she remembered some young senator from Illinois the last time she was in Iowa, and that, while it had been years since then, she hoped to return more quickly next time.

Bill, being a jazz man, did a little riff.

He went off in his remarks on Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s having been found out saying the passage of campaign-finance reform was the lowest point of his Senate career.

Clinton wondered: Worse than 9/11? Worse than the economic meltdown of 2008?

He told the Democratic crowd that if they elected Democrats, “You will not have to worry that, if you elect them, 30 years from now, they will actually stand up with a straight face before a bunch of rich out-of-state donors and say, ‘The saddest day of my life was when I couldn’t take it all from you and keep it a secret.’”

Now, under Citizens United, the Koch brothers are “running black-bag operations” for Republicans, Clinton said.

The man does have a facility for synthesizing information and expressing it richly, does he not?

And the woman who may take him back to the White House? Or vice versa?

She has other attributes: discipline, toughness and a greater familiarity with the concepts of a schedule and a clock.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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